The Anti-Slavery Movement

In 1835 William Lloyd Garrison’s New England Anti-Slavery Society became the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society as an adjunct to the American Anti-Slavery Society. By then, developing networks of local anti-slavery societies—the idea of bottom-up reform—had gained favor. The Essex County Anti-Slavery Society was formed on April 4, 1834 at a meeting in Topsfield by 46 men from eleven towns in Essex County. They resolved to promote the establishment of local anti-slavery societies in every town in the county that did not already have one. Topsfield, Newburyport, Salem, Beverly, Danvers, Andover, and Marblehead were the first. Present at the 1834 meeting were Rev. Gardner B. Perry, a Congregational minister, and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The new zeal for grassroots activism extended to Cape Ann, where anti-slavery groups formed in the neighborhoods of West Gloucester and Annisquam to discuss ways to eliminate slavery in their communities. In Annisquam, the anti-slavery group, founded in 1839, apparently debated (and rejected as unfeasible) a proposal to pool their money to purchase all the slaves from local slaveowners for the purpose of liberating them.

In Massachusetts, abolitionists focused on promoting free blacks and protecting escaped slaves, as well as on protesting southern slavery, but they also had to be concerned with protecting their right to protest using free speech and nonviolent public demonstration. The anti-slavery movement had sown deep divisions in some communities, such that protesters sometimes faced violent confrontations or risked the loss of civil liberties. As a result, and with increasing tensions over events leading to the Civil War, anti-slavery societies either became more militant or fractured over the choice between active resistance and non-violence. Many other issues divided abolitionists: for example, was slavery illegal and unconstitutional in addition to being immoral? In 1849 the Massachusetts educator Horace Mann addressed Congress in a speech, “Slavery and the Slave Trade”, attempting to prove that slavery, and not just the slave trade, was illegal. Even after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, some people demanded that the original articles of the United States Constitution be rewritten to omit references to slavery.

Anti-slavery sentiment was not universally shared in New England, however. Cape Ann, whose prosperity had been based on the slave economy, was not in the forefront of the abolition movement. Abolitionists were seen by some as threatening to local economic prosperity, because by the late 1840s abolitionists on principle were boycotting goods produced by slave labor, especially cane sugar and clothing made of cotton. The so-called “free-produce movement”, spearheaded by Quakers and supported by reformers such as Wendell Phillips, targeted other commodities made by slaves as well, including various dry goods, shoes, soaps, ice cream, and candy. Other related movements boycotted tobacco and rum.

Concerns about the local economy, and about the potential loss of local control that abolition might bring, would have resonated with the people of Cape Ann. In an 1861 referendum (the same year that people were buying shares in the Rockport Steam Cotton Mill. Gloucester voted to preserve the Union and condemn slavery as immoral. In the same instrument, however, they voted to preserve the right of slaveowners to their property and the constitutional right of states to have slavery if they wished. Latent racism undoubtedly also played a role, along with the fear that waves of freed slaves arriving as cheap labor would rob Cape Ann workers of jobs. In 1863 forty-three Rockport residents signed a petition to have a law passed prohibiting “any more persons of color” from becoming citizens of Massachusetts.

To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of Massachusetts, in General Court assembled, we citizens and legal voters of the Town of Rockport in the county of Essex respectfully request Your Honors to pass a Law forbidding any more persons of color from coming into the State of Massachusetts to become citizens of the State.
Rockport, Feby [February] 10th, 1863

The Fernal Petition

Signed:

James Fernal
H. S. Philbrook
James Peters
James Clark
J. Knowlton
Even Pool Jr.
Chas. S. Tarr
William Lowe
Brainard Low
J. Manning
John J. Manning
Withrop Tarr
Joseph T. Haskins
J. S. Choate
J. F. Moore
H. P. Bray
M. H. Knight
Albert M. Sanborn
Anson Stimson
W. M. Manning
E. B. Andrews
Alvin Sanborn
Edward G. Slocum
James Gee

S. P. Randall
Chas. Knowlton Jr.
George Witham
Benjamin Knights
Edward Maguire
Morris Hill
Paul Choate
Alpheus (?) Pierce
Joshua Tarr
Francis Tarr Jr.
Levi S. Gott
Levi Tarr
Walter Knowlton
George W. Tarr
Eben Blatchford
George Elwell
Joshua Sanborn
Lyman Pool

The Fugitive Slave Act

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 created further division as some people helped return runaways to their owners, while others helped them escape. The Act benefitted bounty hunting enterprises that had begun a hundred years earlier. In 1851 Robert Rantoul Jr. of Beverly, formerly of Gloucester and a member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, gave a speech in Lynn condemning the Fugitive Slave Act. He was among the lawyers and legislators who defended escaped slaves in court and entreated state and federal governments to legislate against slavery. Other lawyers in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society who defended African Americans seeking freedom included Samuel Sewall, Ellis Loring, and Rufus Spalding. In 1854 in landmark cases, Boston lawyers Richard Henry Dana Jr. and Robert Morris of Salem, one of the first black lawyers in the country, unsuccessfully defended fugitive slaves Anthony Burns and Shadrach Minkins. Burns’ forced return to slavery in Virginia sparked riots in Boston, and abolitionists eventually found a way to buy him back. To prevent the same outcome, Minkins was hidden away and led to freedom in Canada to escape his judgment.

Advertisement for a Fugitive Slave, Titus, of Gloucester
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made mandatory a practice earlier reserved for slave bounty hunters.
Source: adverts250project.org

On July 4, 1854, members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society met in Harmony Grove in Framingham, elected officers, including Charles Hovey of Gloucester, and gave speeches before thousands of people gathered to protest the Fugitive Slave Act. William Lloyd Garrison spoke after dramatically burning a copy of the law. Other speakers included Sojourner Truth, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Remond, Stephen S. Foster, and Wendell Phillips, a champion of women’s and Native Americans’ rights as well as of abolition. Thoreau, who toured and wrote about Gloucester’s Dogtown in 1858, gave a speech on “Slavery in Massachusetts”. . Phillips, who also spoke in Gloucester in 1859 and again in 1865, also cautioned that Massachusetts and the non-South were not really as opposed to slavery as people assumed

“We shall never get any better, until we see ourselves in an honest glass; until we get out of this habit of praising ourselves. The people of Massachusetts are not Abolitionists—but a very small portion of them. The State is a pro-slavery State, as a whole. The Fourth of July is a pro-slavery day—a day meant to commemorate the independence of thirteen States, in every one of which there were slaves when the Declaration was issued; and not one of which took the slightest measure, for years afterwards, to free a slave.”¹⁴https://www.walden.org/lectures/thoreaus-lectures-before-walden-lecture-43/

Harmony Grove, Framingham
Between 1846 and 1865 Cape Ann abolitionists attended
Fourth of July Anti-Slavery Society meetings at Harmony Grove..
Source: Common Place

Anti-Slavery and Anti-Discrimination Petitions before the Civil War

Slavery and Social, Economic, and Political Unrest

In the first half of the 19th century, America was in a state of economic, political, and social turmoil. Protests against slavery, war, alcohol and tobacco production and use, as well as protests in favor of women’s right to vote, and against the admission of new states that permitted the sale, trade, ownership, and forced labor of slaves, grew in force. The nation was becoming more and more politically divided and southern states were preparing to defend, at all costs, their right to own slaves and their slave-based economy while northern states prepared to protect individual freedom and to preserve and protect the union.

Slave labor, along with high cultivation and land productivity rates, in the southern U.S. and in Caribbean and West Indian colonial plantations where sugar cane, tobacco and cotton were grown, provided a competitive economic advantage to American products over those produced in other parts of the world.

Cotton was a crop the Southern states could supply in abundance and, with an enslaved workforce, could compete with other cotton-producing countries. Southern planters had significantly lower labor costs though they still had to house, feed and clothe the slaves at some level.

With industrialization and the development of the steam engine, power loom, and the cotton gin, the country’s economy was growing rapidly and was soon able to meet the world’s growing demand for cotton.

The slave trade in the United States was banned by the “Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves” which was passed in 1807 and took effect January 1,1808. This reduced the number of slaves allowed and actually brought into the country but the number of slaves in the U.S. continued to increase through the birth of enslaved children. As a result, while the importation of slaves diminished, the size of the enslaved population and the trade in slaves between states in the upper South and other states continued.

A major factor that drew attention and concern among those in the anti-slavery and abolition movement was the Louisiana Purchase. This was the purchase of a vast body of rich fertile land in the western Mississippi River basin from France in 1803.

As a result of the purchase, cotton-growing lands were being absorbed into the Union at a rapid rate. To ensure that a political balance of power was maintained between the North and the South, Congress determined that the number of free (non-slave-owning) states should equal the number of slave-owning states. New states were therefore only accepted in paired units of one free and one slave owning state. Abolitionists protested that no state which sanctioned slavery should be admitted.

The Act “to prohibit the importation of slaves in any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States.” National Archives.

In addition, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 were passed into law. These Acts permitted the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the territory of the United States. However, as shown in the broadside below, posted by Theodore Parker, a Massachusetts abolitionist, African Americans in Boston were warned about the possibility of slave hunters in the area attempting to capture and return runaway slaves.

Given all of the social and political unrest and change, social reform organizations such as the Peace Society, the Temperance movement, Women’s Suffrage and Abolitionist groups, as well as religious organizations and less well-known or well-organized groups began to flourish in the northern states. They printed petitions and gathered signatures demanding Congress adhere to the words of the Constitution and enact new laws upholding sobriety, equality, and freedom.

1851 Broadside warning African American residents of Boston of kidnappers and slave catchers in the city. Boston Public Library National Park Service.

Anti-Slavery Petitions from Cape Ann

Anti-Slavery societies began to form and grow in the Northern states around the time of the American Revolution and were joined in the early 19th century by Protestant religious groups. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Arthur Lewis Tappan, James Forten, Robert Purvis, and Wendell Phillips⁴American Abolitionist Society http://www.americanabolitionists.com/american-anti-slavery-society.html. founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and by 1840 it had 2,000 affiliated societies with over 250,000 members. During the pre-war period however, business owners and others were in opposition to the anti-slavery movement because of their dependence on the products produced in the slave states.

Anti-Slavery societies and abolitionists cited numerous reasons for opposing slavery, including reliance on the foundations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause which they believed prohibited slavery. In 1834, the societies began an anti-slavery petition drive.

The Southern States wanted to silence the abolitionist cause and southern members of Congress gained enough power in 1836 to pass and enforce a set of Gag Rules in the U.S. House of Representatives. These rules “…automatically ‘tabled’ or postponed any action on all petitions related to slavery without hearing them.”

Anti-slavery petition drives were organized in protest of the Gag Rules by the American Anti-Slavery Society and its regional affiliates. The Gag Rule was later rescinded in 1844 by a vote of the House on a motion made by John Quincy Adams.⁸The subjects of these petitions were primarily: Prohibiting the annexing of new slave-owning states, protesting the gag rule, remonstrating against discrimination on the railroads, agitating to repeal the laws against interracial marriage, and opposing the Fugitive Slave Act.

Beginning in 1838 with the issue of slave-owning states being admitted to the Union and ending in 1861 with the last protest about the Fugitive Slave Act, Cape Ann sent over 100 petitions to Congress and the Massachusetts General Court. Seventy-Six of these petitions pertained directly to the issue of slavery and its attendant evils. These documents contain around 8,000 signatures, a significant number, even allowing for those who signed several different petitions. Almost half of the petitions were signed by both sexes and ten of them were presented solely by women. The Town of Essex led the petition field with 48 petitions containing over 5,600 signatures. Protests against the Fugitive Slave Acts garnered the most petitions within the Cape Ann area (8 from Gloucester, 2 from Rockport and 15 from Essex) with a total of 3807 signatures. The following represent a sampling of these petitions.

Opposition to the Admission of Slave States

In April 1838 the Massachusetts Senate drew up a series of resolutions regarding slavery, collectively titled Senate Bill 0087. Report on the Powers and Duties of Congress upon the Subject of Slavery and the Slave Trade.⁹Massachusetts State Library. www.archives.lib.state.ma.us. and Acts and Resolves passed by the General Court, pp.742-744. Declaring that the inhuman traffic of slaves was a national disgrace and a sin, the main points of the bill were that Congress should act on its power to:

Abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia
Abolish slavery in the Territories of the United States
Prohibit the admission of any new state that allows slavery
Prohibit the slave trade among the States of the Union

In response to this bill, Cape Ann citizens sent several petitions to Congress in 1838 and 1839, with specific opposition to the admission of the slave owning states of Florida and Texas, which were applying to join the Union, and the District of Columbia where slave ownership remained legal. In 1838, 40 Gloucester men signed a petition demanding Congress exercise its right to abolish slavery in Washington, DC, and similar petitions were submitted in 1839 when 68 West Gloucester women, 211 Sandy Bay (Rockport) residents, both men and women, and a total of 881 Essex inhabitants in 10 separate petitions, also focused on Washington, DC. 1839 also saw another 38 Gloucester men, led by Thomas Haskell, object to the inclusion of Texas and 101 Essex men were against annexing Florida.

The 1839 Essex petition, submitted by John Perkins, a tanner and an incorporator of the Essex Temperance Society, reads:

“The undersigned, legal voters of the Town of Essex in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, having read with great pleasure, the resolution of your honorable bodies, the last year, declaring –
‘That no new State should hereafter be admitted into the Union, whose constitution shall permit the existence of domestic slavery’ –
do now respectfully and earnestly pray your honorable bodies, to protest, in the name of the people of this Commonwealth, against the admission of Florida, or any other new State, with such a constitution of government.”

The men and women who signed this petition were from all walks of life. Among the first ten names were Perkins, Cogswell, Eveleth, Choate, Andrews and Mears. They were carpenters, shoemakers, rope makers, teachers and farmers, ranging in age from twenty-eight to sixty-two. Several of them were also members of the Essex Temperance Society with Mr. Perkins.

Petition for Equal Rights in Rail Travel Accommodations

In February 1842, the Boston abolitionist newspaper the Liberator reported that railroad officials had assaulted an African American gentleman and ejected him from a train. It was not the first such incident. Frederick Douglass, for example, was similarly treated; but it initiated a strong reaction from the general population.

parchment petition opposing slave states

Petition in Opposition to the Admission of New Slave States. Dataverse.

The article explained that among the passengers waiting to board the two car train at Taunton were a group of abolitionists, including “several colored people,” returning from the Quarterly Meeting of the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society which had been held in Taunton. The conductor advised the passengers already seated in the rear car to move to the first car, leaving the other one free to be occupied by the mixed race group, who soon filled it. Two more African American men turned up just as the train was about to leave the station and, finding no seats available with the abolitionists, sat in the first car. A single passenger in that car objected to their presence and the two were summarily and violently forced from the train by the conductor. One of them balked at their treatment and was punched, kicked and thrown on the tracks by the conductor and several other railroad employees. Many of the passengers were outraged and vociferously berated the aggressors while others urged them on, and the confrontation soon devolved into violence.

Petition for Equal Rights in Rail Travel Accommodations. Harvard Library. Dataverse.

This incident provoked the Reverend John Allen, minister of the Rockport Universalist Church, to initiate a petition that was then signed by 235 men and women of Cape Ann, requesting that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

“… pass a law declaring and defining the rights of the people of this Commonwealth in the use of the means of conveyance furnished by the Railroad Companies therein, in order that the officers of said Companies may no longer claim the right of insulting or assaulting any of their passengers on the sole ground of a difference of color.”

The signers on this petition were fishermen, farmers, quarrymen and tradesmen, unmarried young women and widows, with familiar Cape Ann names such as Norwood, Poole, Lane, Parsons, and Knowlton. John Allen was an ardent advocate for prison reform, temperance, and women’s rights as well as abolition.

Petitions Against the Fugitive Slave Acts

A Fugitive Slave Act had been written into law by Congress in 1793 in support of Article 4 of the Constitution which delineated the relationship among states, specifically extradition and freedom of movement. The law authorized local governments to seize and return escapees to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight. This law was weakened in 1842 when the supreme Court determined that states were not obliged to aid in the recapture of enslaved persons. In consequence, the numbers of slaves escaping to the north increased, which prompted Virginia Senator James M. Mason to draft a new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. This Act decreed that all escaped slaves were to be returned to their slave owners upon capture, irrespective of where the capture took place. It also proposed stiff fines for officials who refused to arrest a purported escaped slave (and a promotion for those who did), nullified Habeas corpus, and promised imprisonment for anyone aiding a fugitive slave. The alleged slave, once arrested, was to be denied a trial by jury and could not testify on their own behalf. Abolitionists called it the ‘Bloodhound Bill’ and rallied to the cause.

In late 1842, arguments about slavery, equal rights and moral reform coalesced around the jailing of a freed slave named George Latimer. He and his wife had been chased from Virginia to Boston by James Gray who claimed Latimer was not free but was in fact a fugitive, and he (Gray) owned him. Gray had Latimer arrested and jailed. Latimer’s friends and supporters demanded he be freed on bail but were refused, the judge ruling that a “writ of habeas corpus … was not applicable to the case of a fugitive slave.” (Habeas corpus is the right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.)

Although Latimer’s situation had nothing to do with interracial marriage, his race, former enslavement, abuse by authorities and the resulting public outcry, made his mistreatment the focus for all aspects of racial inequality. Outraged, the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator printed an editorial:

“Will a free people be guilty of the atrocity of seizing a self-emancipated slave, as soon as he comes among them? … Are the people of this Commonwealth prepared to repudiate the Declaration of Independence, and to abjure the fundamental principles of their State Constitution?”

A somewhat riotous public meeting to discuss the seizure of supposed fugitive slaves was held at Faneuil Hall, followed by a string of smaller local gatherings dubbed ‘Latimer Meetings.’ These in turn led to the development of two major petitions: the Great Petition to Congress and the Great Massachusetts Petition. This latter demanded that the Massachusetts Senate: 1) …forbid all law enforcement officials from arresting a fugitive slave… 2) … refuse to allow any jail to be used to detain a fugitive slave, and 3) …amend the state constitution to remove Massachusetts from any connection with slavery. It collected over 65,000 signatures state-wide including 34 on a Gloucester petition that read, in part,

“The petition of the undersigned legal voters of Gloucester in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts respectfully represent, that they regard the law of this Commonwealth which prohibits the intermarriage of persons of different Colours as, (practically speaking,)
1) Useless, at best, – that is, in cases where it may conveniently be evaded.
2) Far worse than useless, when enforced, – because tending to illicit and immoral connexions.”

They then went on to give six reasons why they objected, on principle, to the law, the main points being that it was: wrong in the eyes of God; at variance with the Constitution; a blot on the Statutes of a free state. Finally, they plead for a repeal of:

“… said law and all other laws of this Commonwealth … which make any distinction among the inhabitants on account of Colour, or for any real or supposed difference of races.”

Headed by Ignatius Sargent who, though Gloucester born, was a Boston based merchant and president of the Globe Bank in 1843, the signers were from well-known Gloucester families. The first ten names included four mariners – Joshua Tucker Jr., Luther Sargent, Joshua Griffin and Joseph R. Stevens; two fishermen – John E. Woodbury and William Young; a doctor – Winthrop Sargent, a farmer – Daniel Young Jr. and William Woodbury who was a tin plate worker.

Petition Against Prohibition of Interracial Marriage. Harvard Library Dataverse

Cape Ann Petition Against the Fugitive Slave Acts

Between 1851 and 1861 Cape Ann citizens signed 25 petitions protesting this Act. Among them were 31 Gloucester men who signed a request in 1851 that began:

“We the undersigned Inhabitants of Gloucester respectfully ask your Honorable Bodies to protest against the law passed at the last Session of Congress, in relation to the Surrender of Fugitive Slaves, in the name of the Commonwealth and to instruct the Senators and request the Representatives of the State to make every effort for its immediate repeal.”

Thomas Haskell, West Gloucester farmer and longtime activist in both the Peace Movement and Abolition, headed the roster. The signers ranged in age from twenty to sixty and were shoemakers, laborers, farmers, and fishermen. Included among the first ten names were those of butcher Silas Bray and the minister of the Trinity Congregational church, Rev. Levi Wheaton.

Rockport men also protested the Act in 1851 with 203 signing a similar petition, among them Reverend John Allen who had been the Universalist minister there in the 1840s, heading Rockport’s 1842 anti-discrimination petition, and Rev. H. Van Campen, the incumbent minister of Rockport’s First Universalist Society. In 1859 Gloucester drew up another anti-slave- hunting petition signed by 33 men, and the State of Massachusetts submitted one containing 183 names, among them Reverend John Allen again, and Reverend Jere H. Farnsworth, recently appointed Rockport’s Universalist minister. Reverend Farnsworth also signed the 1860 Rockport anti-slave hunting petition which collected 112 signatures. In all, between 1851 and 1859, Essex residents’ signatures numbered over 3,000 in 15 petitions.

Not all residents thought alike on the matter of slavery and abolition. It is worth repeating that, as shown in the section above at the beginning of The Anti-Slavery Movement section, not all groups on Cape Ann were in favor of abolition. There was a petition submitted to the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives by a number of Cape Ann residents in 1863 requesting the passage of “a law forbidding any more persons of color from coming into the State of Massachusetts to become citizens of the state.”

Nevertheless, the petitions serve as clear evidence of an organized anti-slavery and abolitionist movement among residents of Cape Ann.

Fugitive Slave Petition. Harvard Library Dataverse.

Cape Ann Abolitionists

In this fraught context, other people with connections to Cape Ann were members or lecturers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society or its local chapters, begun in the 1830s. Henry C. Wright, for example, whose letterbook was found in the Annisquam Historical Society’s
Deluge 8 Firehouse on Walnut St. in Gloucester, gave a speech at the 1838 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Faneuil Hall in Boston. In 1854 Maria Weston Chapman and John T. Sargent served as “counsellors” providing guidance to the organization, and Mehitable Haskell of Gloucester was a nominating officer. Mehitable, or “Aunt Hitty” (1789-1878) and her brother Thomas (1791-1873) were both very active in the anti-slavery movement. Thomas Haskell was president of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1842 and arranged for Charles Remond and Parker Pillsbury to visit Rockport during a Quarterly Meeting of the Society at the Universalist Church in Rockport.

Abolitionist Speaker, Charles Remond

Other counsellors included Edmund Quincy, John Rogers, Charles K. Whipple, William T. Bowditch, and a former Universalist minister, John Murray Spear. Maria Chapman and others were also members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, which had gotten underway in 1848 at Seneca Falls. Speakers for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society who were also in the women’s rights movement included, for example, Lucy Stone, Harriet Martineau, and Anne Warren Weston. Counsellor John T. Sargent was a Unitarian minister in Boston related to Judith Sargent Murray of Gloucester.

Another active member, officer, and supporter of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was Gloucester resident Charles F. Hovey, wealthy owner of a department store on Summer Street in Boston (later the site of Jordan Marsh), whose house still stands at 4-6 Hovey St. He and a group of businessmen provided most of the funding for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Hovey was also a women’s rights activist and a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee (founded by Thomas Dalton and the Brattle St. merchants), which directly aided runaway slaves and supported the Underground Railroad. One might reasonably speculate that the Hovey House was made available for that purpose, although it was not on one of the direct escape routes through Essex County. A house owned by William H. Haskell, whose property extended between Pleasant St. and Dale Ave. in Gloucester, also was reputed to be on the Underground Railroad.

Hovey Department Store Ad
Source: Shopping Days in Retro Boston

Hovey’s Department Store
Source: Wikipedia

Charles F. Hovey House
Source: Google

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a sophisticated network of safe houses and assistance to runaways. Although the main routes in Essex County were overland, the rivers and harbors of the coast provided important escape routes by sea for runaways headed to Canada. At great personal risk, free blacks, white abolitionists, and religious leaders were among the railroad’s “conductors”. Other than the Haskell House and Hovey House in Gloucester, stops on the Underground Railroad included the Daniel Friend House on 8 Friend St. and the Bingham Home on 7 Central St., both in
Manchester-by-the-Sea, and the Old Parsonage on 19 North Main St. in Ipswich.

Essex County Escape Routes on the Underground Railroad

William Haskell was one of the first to cast abolition votes in Gloucester and knew William Lloyd Garrison and other luminaries in the anti-slavery movement, such as Wendell Phillips, Horace Greeley, and Parker Pillsbury. Gloucester selectman Nathaniel Babson was also a strong supporter of abolition, while other members of the Babson clan invested in cotton and participated as sea captains in the Surinam trade.

Officers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society included James N. Buffun, John Remond of Salem, an African American caterer, his son Charles L. Remond and wife Sarah, and Parker Pillsbury, born in Andover, a minister and lecturer for the organization. James Buffun, a Quaker who became mayor of Lynn, corresponded with the abolitionist Henry C. Wright to arrange meetings for Frederick Douglass in Scotland. In 1845 Buffum went to Scotland with Douglass to protest against the Free Church of Scotland accepting money donated by American slaveholders. Wright corresponded with them both and with abolitionists in Scotland and Ireland, helping to arrange introductions and accommodations.

Mehitable Haskell and Her Brother Thomas Haskell

Mehitable Haskell (1789-1878), known as Hitty most of her life, and Thomas Haskell (1791-1873) were the youngest of nine children of Aaron Haskell and Sarah (Burnham) Haskell who lived in West Gloucester. Thomas married and kept a farm in West Gloucester. Mehitable remained single and worked as a “tailoress”, going from house to house cutting and sewing clothing.

For most of their adult lives Thomas and Mehitable were deeply involved in various aspects of social reform: The Peace Society (dedicated to abolishing the use of arms or force as deterrents), the Washingtonian Temperance organization (advocating a path to sobriety akin to today’s Alcoholics Anonymous), Women’s Suffrage (campaigning for equality between the sexes) and the Abolitionist movement (demanding the end of slavery). Although deeply religious, neither was affiliated with any particular church. Thomas was a shareholder in Liberty Hall – an interdenominational meeting place in West Gloucester, and at her death Mehitable requested two dear friends to eulogize her rather than a minister.

Thomas became involved in the Anti-Slavery movement through his association with the Peace movement. He, along with Charles Spear and Abraham Haskell, represented Gloucester at a Peace Convention in Boston in September 1838, making their voices heard among such notables as Henry C. Wright, William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Chapman and Wendell Phillips. It was agreed that the organization would be known as the New England Non-Resistance Society, and Article III of their constitution stated that “any person, without distinction of sex or color, who consents to the principles of this Constitution, and contributes to the funds of this Society, may become a member and be entitled to vote at its meetings.”

The following year “Thomas Haskell and 37 others of Gloucester” were among those petitioning the Massachusetts Legislature to vote against the admission of Florida and Texas into the Union as slave states, and to prohibit by law slave traffic between the States. Another family member, Sarah Haskell, “and 67 others of Gloucester” were among those petitioning for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Thomas was then the President and Sarah the Secretary of the West Gloucester Anti-Slavery Society and Thomas and Abraham Haskell traveled to Boston to attend a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society.

By January 1842 Thomas Haskell had become a Vice-President of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society, when it met in the Universalist Church in Rockport. Reacting to the slave revolt on board the Creole the previous November, the Society’s members, while decrying the violence, applauded the result stating:

“that the prejudice existing in this country against the negro, on account of his complexion, which is so apparent not only on southern plantations, but in the churches, stages, steamboats, railroad cars, grave-yards, and other associations and arrangements of the North, is manifestly vulgar, cruel and murderous; and ought to be as far removed from every human breast, as it is from that God who is no respecter of persons.”⁹

Thomas continued with the various Anti-Slavery groups, speaking at a convention held by the local Society in Gloucester Town Hall in July 1848. In 1849 the Essex County Abolitionists decried the actions of President Zachary Taylor who, they opined, was “stained all over with human blood, and the owner of a large number of his fellow-countrymen as his slaves and chattels personal.”

In 1849 Thomas revisited the Non-Resistance Society by adding his name to those petitioning for the abolition of the death penalty in Massachusetts. A year later the petition was repeated with Thomas “and 23 others” from Gloucester signing on, and Mehitable’s name officially appeared in the social reform arena for the first time: “Mehitable Haskell and 21 others, females.” Except for this instance Mehitable seems to have come to Anti-Slavery through the conduit of Women’s Suffrage, many of whose advocates were also abolitionists. She was among the speakers at the second National Women’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, MA in 1851, where she said:

“This meeting, as I understand it, was called to discuss the question of Woman’s Rights. Well, I do not pretend to know exactly what woman’s rights are; but I know that I have groaned for forty, yea, for fifty years, under a sense of woman’s wrongs.”¹⁴McCord, Louisa S.C., Political and Social Essays, 1995, fn7 p.129

Her speech was notable enough that the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel reported that a “gallant member of the Tennessee Legislature, fired with a sense of the woes of women” made reference to it during a session.

Throughout the 1850s Thomas and Mehitable Haskell held influential positions in the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society and contacts were made through various meetings and events. Wendell Phillips, who was among the speakers at the Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, became a close friend of Mehitable, frequently visiting her in her West Gloucester home, as did Lucy Stone. In 1858 Mehitable was chosen to be on the Business Committee of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Maria W. Chapman, Stephen S. Foster, Charles L. Remond, Parker Pillsbury and Henry C. Wright.

In 1865 Thomas Haskell, “that veteran reformer,” advertised in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator for a married couple to take over the running of his West Gloucester farm, stipulating that any applicants were not to use “intoxicating drinks, tobacco, or profane language.” He died a childless widower in December 1873, leaving his property to several nieces and nephews. Mehitable died five years later and her funeral was held from her West Gloucester home November 5, 1878. Instead of the usual officiating minister she asked that Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone speak. Wendell Phillips said:

“She still made time, out of what we should have thought perhaps a narrow life, to consider the broadest problems, and think upon all the disputed questions of the age. And although deeply interested, profoundly interested, in such questions, I never saw in her the slightest intolerance. …[her] active brain has been by the blessing of God a strength and a help to break the chains of four millions of people, and remove the deeper prejudice even than that which curbs the sphere of woman.”²¹Bray, Maria Herrick, Aunt Hitty, Salem Press, 1908

Abolitionist Speakers on Cape Ann

Famous abolitionists spoke to audiences on Cape Ann and elsewhere in Essex and Middlesex counties between the late 1840s and late 1860s. In 1861, for example, Parker Pillsbury gave a lecture at the First Universalist Society of Rockport that was marred by an act of violence. His audience included members of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society, but roughly half the congregation opposed his presence and anti-slavery stance. He had been invited by free speech advocate and minister at the time Rev. Stillman Barden. According to one account of the attack on Pillsbury:

A Bomb-Shell in Church.—On Sunday evening, November 1, 1861, there were in the Universalist Church an audience of about seventy persons listening to an address on the slavery question by Parker Pillsbury. While he was speaking some person threw a sort of bomb-shell through a window on the north side of the house; it fell near Mr. Pillsbury’s feet and exploded. The audience were greatly frightened and left the house, which was filled with smoke. After the smoke cleared some few persons returned to the church, and Mr. Pillsbury resumed his lecture. There was no other disturbance. This missile was made by wrapping a few pieces of coal and a quantity of powder in a cloth and securing it by a cord tightly drawn about it; the whole saturated with spirits of turpentine….

Chroniclers of this event at the time suggested it might have been an inside job, as the first several rows of pews were unaccountably unoccupied at the time, and it was known that a substantial number of members of the congregation were opposed to having a speaker on abolition.

In January 1842 Frederick Douglass also spoke at a quarterly meeting of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society in Rockport, uneventfully, and in 1844 and 1845 he addressed the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society in various towns, including Dodge Hall in Manchester-by-the-Sea, which was in the Manchester Hotel on Center Street, no longer in existence.

Wendell Phillips spoke in Gloucester in October 1865, followed by Frederick Douglass in November, who spoke at Gloucester’s Methodist Church at 436 Washington St. It was a time of national trauma that had further radicalized the abolition movement. In 1857 the Supreme Court had decided that Dred Scott was property, not a person entitled to freedom. In 1859 the abolitionist John Brown had been hanged for treason. In 1863 African Americans had begun fighting in the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army. In 1865 the Civil War had just ended, preserving the Union, and President Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated. Douglass’s talk, “Abraham Lincoln, A Speech”, referred to in local papers as “The Assassination of Lincoln and Its Lessons” was an impassioned warning that the work of the anti-slavery movement was not over despite the fact that Emancipation had been declared, pending ratification, and that the Civil War was over, pending Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln’s great promise had been betrayed through assassination, and the future was far from certain.

Douglass may have been concerned that Cape Ann’s wealthy cotton and sugar shippers and merchants would resume commercial relations with southern suppliers for plantation products, eroding or even reversing the hard-won achievements of the abolition movement. He began his speech by castigating a bloody war stubbornly begun by a privileged southern class (“a malignant oligarchy”) wishing to perpetuate itself through slavery (“a slavocracy”), and by eulogizing the terrible loss (“unspeakable calamity”) of “one of the best men that ever presided over this or any other country.” Lincoln was “the architect of his own fortune,” which was what slavery denied to those less fortunate. Lincoln’s life, he said, pointed to both “the dangers and the duties” of their time in history. The dangers were that the slave economy and racial inequality would not be overthrown after all. The duties included embracing the principles that Lincoln’s life represented: of righteousness, progressiveness, honorableness, humaneness, and dedication to freedom in unity.

In whatever else this Union may fail, in this we are resolved not to fail: that Slavery, in root and branch, in leaf and fibre, shall be blotted out forever in this nation….We commit a great mistake if we do not now and forever settle the negro question; we have got hold of it, and should settle it now and forever, in light of our recent contest, and of justice, so that it may never again arise, in any form.

Wendell Phillips (1811-1844) Daguerrotype by Matthew Brady
Source: Wikipedia

Parker Pillsbury (1809-1898)
Source: Masshist.org

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
Source: Wikipedia

What people in the Gloucester audience thought of Douglass’s speech, we do not know. The Gloucester Telegraph noted that the speech was “extremely radical” and “there was little applause, as the lecture was in a church edifice.”

Newspaper Announcement of Frederick Douglass Speech in Gloucester
Source: Gloucester Telegraph, October 25, 1865 (public domain)

The Henry C. Wright Letterbook as a Window on the Times

An example of the vicissitudes of the times is the career of an abolitionist with local ties: Henry C. Wright. Wright was raised in New York, apprenticed as a hatmaker, studied at Andover Theological Seminary, and became a pastor of the Congregational Church in West Newbury. In 1823 he married a wealthy widow, Elizabeth LeBreton Stickney of Newburyport. Elizabeth Stickney had relatives in Annisquam, including John F. Stickney, who died in Annisquam in 1866, as did his second wife, Mary Ann Tarr Hillier. Stickneys had married Cape Ann Lanes, Sargents, Chards, Duleys, and Peirces. Exactly how Wright’s letterbook (a scrapbook into which letters received or copies of letters sent were pasted) ended up in Annisquam’s Deluge 8 firehouse, however, remains a mystery.

The 165 handwritten letters and notes in the letterbook relate to Wright’s efforts to start protest movements and anti-slavery societies in the Northeast and to his speaking tour in England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1843-1846. Correspondents include George Thompson, Mary Carpenter, John Murray, James Robertson, William Lovett, Andrew Paton, Daniel O’Connell, Sarah and Elizabeth Poole, Richard Webb, and other prominent and lesser-known figures in the Quaker, Universalist, and International emancipation movements that preceded the Civil War. The letters in the Henry C. Wright Letterbook refer to individuals and events of the times, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and the plight of the slaves Ephraim and Ancona Robin James; the establishment of the London Working Men’s Association, Scottish Anti-Slavery Society, and Glasgow Emancipation Society; and the development of ideas promoting activism for women’s rights, pacifism, and anarchism.

Ephraim and Ancona Robin James, for example, were young Biafran brothers from a royal African family, forced into slavery in 1767 following a massacre by British slavers. The boys were repeatedly sold, recaptured, and resold, back and forth between ports in North America and the British Isles. The story of their plight, campaigns for freedom, release from slavery via the English court system, and ultimate repatriation to their homeland in 1773 became a justification for Britain’s 1807 and 1833 anti-slavery laws and a benchmark of the abolition movement in Europe.

The letters make the people and events real. A letter to Henry Wright from the famous English abolitionist Andrew Paton (1805-1884), for example, reads in part:

Glasgow 30th January 1846

Dear Henry,
I wrote you…that I was glad of your continued success in diffusing Anti-Slavery. This morning I showed William Smeal your letter detailing your novel [experiences?] for returning from Scotland the disgrace brought on us by the “Free” taking “blood money” from the American slaveholders. [Smeal] was pleased with the idea & thinks if brought forward the best way will be at a public meeting in Glasgow on the return of yourself, Douglass, & Buffum. He is to consider of it further for a day, but this is his present opinion. [He] has another letter from Ian Fenwick informing the good meeting you had in Perth & sending a Perth newspaper containing a short notice of it….[The] paper contains report of an excellent meeting against militia on peace principles at which Stowel [William Scott—Lord Stowell?] spoke.

We are all well…. When do you return & what are your plans in the north! Best love from all to yourself, & D [Douglass] & B [Buffum] if in your company. I am, Dear Henry,

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Paton

Wright joined the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1834 and for the next three years traveled to cities and towns throughout Massachusetts to spread the movement. The Gloucester neighborhood of Annisquam established an anti-slavery society in 1839. Wright met with famous abolitionists of his day, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Dwight Weld. In their Newburyport home Wright and his wife entertained the famous abolitionist sisters Sarah Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld.⁷

From 1842 to 1847 Wright traveled in Europe, lecturing, and many of the correspondents in his letterbook refer to the planning and execution of his efforts there and the response. The letters, from activists in England, Scotland, and Ireland, also discuss the outrages of the times and advise Wright to invite Frederick Douglass to speak in Boston. Wright alienated key figures in the abolition movement abroad, however, including James Buffum, George Thompson, and Frederick Douglass, because of his nonconforming religious views (he was against observing the Sabbath, for example) and his insults against members of the Free Church of Scotland.

Wright came to be regarded as so radical and inconsistent that the American Anti-Slavery Society removed him from membership and the Congregational Church dis-owned him. He had changed his stance against non-violence to become more militant and anarchic. Despite an avowed commitment to pacifism, or “nonresistance”, he condoned the use of violence in anti-slavery interventions. Wright turned to spiritualism and shifted his efforts to fighting for women’s rights and world peace through “rule by individual conscience” (i.e., anarchy).

Spiritualism was a religious movement that gained popularity during and after the Civil War and especially affected Universalists, who, like Wright, were among its public speakers and promoters. The movement was based on the belief that the soul can change and grow after death and that the living can have communion with the dead, principally through seances. It is estimated that by 1870 two or three million Americans believed this.